to deal with Elizabeth he was on firmer ground.  By that time the Reformation was an accomplished fact, and the fiercest controversies lay behind him.  Disgusted as he was with the scandals invented against the virgin queen, he did not shrink from exposing the duplicity and meanness which tarnish the lustre of her imperishable renown.  Like Knox, he was insensible to the charms of Mary Stuart, and that is a deficiency hard to forgive in a man.  Yet who can deny that Elizabeth only did to Mary as Mary would have done to her?  The morality of the Guises was as much a part of Mary as her scholarship, her grace, her profound statecraft, the courage which a voluptuous life never imparted.  Froude was not thinking of her, or of any woman.  He was thinking of England.  Between the fall of Wolsey and the defeat of the Armada was decided the great question whether England should be Catholic or Protestant, bond or free.  The dazzling Queen of Scots, like the virtuous Chancellor and the holy Bishop, were on the wrong side.  Henry and Elizabeth, with all their faults, were on the right one.  That is the pith and marrow of Froude’s book.  Those who think that in history there is no side may blame him.  He followed Carlyle.  “Froude is a man of genius,” said Jowett:  “he has been abominably treated.”  “Il a vu iuste,” said a young critic of our own day* in reply to the usual charges of inaccuracy.  The real object of his attack was that ecclesiastical corruption which belongs to no Church exclusively, and is older than Christianity itself.

—­ * Arthur Strong. —­

The main portion of Froude’s life for nearly twenty years was occupied with his History of England from the fall of Wolsey to the defeat of the Spanish Armada.  It is on a large scale, in twelve volumes.  Every chapter bears ample proof of laborious study.  Froude neglected no source of information, and spared himself no pains in pursuit of it.  At the Record Office, in the British Museum, at Hatfield, among the priceless archives preserved in the Spanish village of Simancas, he toiled with unquenchable ardour and unrelenting assiduity.  Nine-tenths of his authorities were in manuscript.  They were in five languages.  They filled nine hundred volumes.  Excellent linguist as he was, Froude could hardly avoid falling into some errors.  With his general accuracy as an historian I shall have to deal in a later part of this book.  Here I am only concerned to prove that he took unlimited pains.  He kept no secretary, he was his own copyist, and he was not a good proof-reader.  Those natural blots, quas aut incuria fudit, aut humaria parum cavit natura, are to be found, no doubt, in his pages.  From a conscientious obedience to truth as he understood it, and a resolute determination to present it as he saw it, he never swerved.  He was not a chronicler, but an artist, a moralist, and a man of genius.  Unless an historian can put himself into the place of the men about whom he is writing, think their thoughts, share their hopes, their aspirations, and their fears, he had better be taking a healthy walk than poring over dusty documents.  A paste-pot, a pair of scissors, the mechanical precision of a copying clerk, are all useful in their way; but they no more make an historian than a cowl makes a monk.